Fearless

I remember the first time (of what would be many times) I saw my young son suddenly cry "snake!" and dive head first into the tall grass of our back yard with his arms stretched out before him. In the seconds it took me to overcome my shock and make it to the tall grass to save my six year-old son, he was already on his feet again, with an eight-inch dirt-colored garden snake wiggling between his fingers. I don't think I've ever seen my son more delighted, and delighted with himself, as he was at that moment. Even so, at the time all I could think was that if that snake had turned out to be a copperhead, I was going to have that Crocodile Hunter guy's ass.

Then last night in a comments thread someone piped in that Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, was dead. Hoping it was a joke, I clicked over to a mainstream media site and sure enough, there were a couple of headlines proclaiming reports of his death, the oldest having been posted forty minutes prior. After I read the reports, I clicked over to Wikipedia to see what they had to say about his life and was startled to find that someone had already edited Irwin's entry to include the story of his demise at the wrong end of a stingray.

Steve and I had a few things in common. We were nearly the same age—he was only a few years older than me—and we were both fathers of young children, so my first thought after learning of his death was of his children, a three year-old son and an eight year-old daughter. My daughter is eight too, so a momentary, personal stab of dread was probably unavoidable for me. But later it was worse as the realization of what we have actually lost in Irwin slowly rose in my mind.

 And by now we all know what we've lost: a fierce conservationist, a committed, successful educator, an insatiable explorer, a wacky, tireless entertainer, and, quite possibly, the absolute coolest dad in all the universe.

 And there is my son again, standing there, beaming with wonder and life, the little snake slithering curiously through his hands. Steve Irwin didn't teach my son to be careless with the natural world, he taught him to be fearless. Thoughtful, but fearless. Because that's the way he was on his show.

Sure, Irwin was a showman at heart, and he was a very good one, so good that sometimes it got him into trouble with his weenie critics. But what he was always teaching us was that even though we humans have managed to separate our daily lives from much of it, we are still an integral part of nature—not interlopers, not voyeurs, not parasites, but actual participants in the natural world. Steve Irwin knew that if we are to preserve our natural world, we needed to understand this, that fear and ignorance were opposite sides of the same destructive force. Thus he showed us, over and over again, fearlessly, that in nature there is nothing to fear and much, much to know. And in doing so he taught my son something very important, and even beautiful, that I never could have. For that, I will always be grateful to him.